Three Things That Can Shut Down A Clients Preparation Session
As trial lawyers, it’s important to remind ourselves about our goals for preparation for any case event. Even when that person has been deposed before or they’ve been to a hearing before, it’s still best that we provide them with a roadmap.
First, make sure to teach them about what the whole event is and how it fits into the case. Then talk about what they can expect and correct any bad expectations if they have any. Ultimately, you want to gear them up for their role.
Either way, it’s a give-and-take conversation. Otherwise, people will hold on to misinformation or misconception that causes confusion, and sometimes anger when it doesn’t go the way they think it’s supposed to. The last thing you want to do with any client is to shut them down.
In this episode, I’m going to discuss the things that we could be doing, whether consciously or subconsciously, that can shut people down – and some ways we could do better as trial lawyers.
In this episode, you will hear:
- How to avoid interrupting people
- Why client comparison shuts down a client
- Things to consider when using yourself as an example
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Supporting Resources:
If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.
Episode Credits:
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Trial Lawyer Prep. Today we are going to be talking about what.
turns a client off in a preparation session, or even just a conversation with their lawyer. And really these work for most people. But before [00:01:00] we jump into the episode, I want to give a little bit of a preview for February episodes coming up. We are going to have three to four episodes directly on trial.
So we are going to look at Direct exam and how to craft one of those. We’re going to look at trial management. We’re going to talk about a template for preparing fact witnesses or before and after witnesses. And I’m also hoping that we can get our guest to come and talk to us about cross exam. So that may bleed over into March, maybe not, but either way, just want to get a little preview.
We are going to be focusing on trial. I have many people in my circle, many folks that I work with that are going to trial very soon, March, May, April, June. and need to get back into that practice, look at some stuff, get some new ideas, get the creativity flowing. But today [00:02:00] we are talking about things that we can do consciously and subconsciously that can shut people down.
And three main things that we’re going to talk about. It’s going to be a pretty brief episode before we jump into those three things. Let’s remind ourselves about our goals for preparation for any case event. These are kind of my three points that I always try to talk with or have a conversation with a client before we have any kind of case event.
Thinking deposition, talking about hearing a trial, going to mediation, any event where they’re going to be there and it’s foreign to them. Um, and. I still go through the prep, even when I have somebody who has been deposed before, or maybe they’ve been to a hearing before. I just want to make sure that we provide them a little bit of a roadmap.
And so the goals that I always have when I sit down to have a conversation is I want to make sure that I am going to teach them [00:03:00] about what the whole event is, how it fits into the case. I want to talk to them about what they can expect. I want to correct any Bad expectations they may have and I say bad, but it just could be incorrect information that they may have and then ultimately I want to gear them up, prepare them, gear them up for what their role is, whatever they may be serving and maybe they’re just going to sit in court and listen.
It may be that they’re going to trial and they’re going to have to get up on the witness stand and give testimony. Maybe at mediation, where there may be good questions. So either way, those are the three pieces that I always look at. That’s not the order. The order would be, of course, let’s handle our expectations and our mindset first.
Then let’s move into teaching. And then ultimately, let’s gear them up. And in that conversation, depending on the event, sometimes these are hours and hours, depending on what we’re doing, generally, the bigger the client role, the more we’re going to spend with them. The [00:04:00] smaller. the role, the less I’m going to spend with them.
But either way, it’s a give and take, it’s a conversation. And always we need to get that give and that take, that back and that forth. And we don’t want to shut things down because then people will hold on to misinformation or a misconception and then that causes, you know, Confusion, sometimes anger, when it doesn’t go the way they think it’s supposed to.
These are easy ways that we sometimes fall into interrupting people. Oh, sorry, the first one is interrupting people. And we do it in a lot of different ways. So again, this is a good reminder for me to talk about this because in my work life, I am very, very focused. I’m listening, but occasionally in my personal life, when I’m outside my work mind, I do this and I interrupt.
I have an assumption that I know what someone’s going to say. So I kind of jump in there and generally doesn’t turn out well for me. So when you’re having personal conversations or in your personal life, you know, these people, right? They’re [00:05:00] probably going to tell you like, don’t interrupt me. But with clients, they might not say that and instead they just shut down.
Whatever they were thinking, they just shut it down and it must not be important. I’m not going to talk about it. So with interrupting, obviously we can do it consciously. Hey, literally just interrupt somebody while they’re mid sentence. And this all comes from a place of wanting to help, right? They have a wrong thought or a misconception, right?
We want to reach out and we want to fix it right away. The better idea is to just listen. Hear it all the way through, understand where it may be coming from if you need to do a follow up question, but taking that all in and then you can always talk right after that. Most of the time when people are in a thought and they’re still going and we interrupt it, they can’t even get it back.
That’s the other hard part about interrupting. This is something that we can use or we do use in depositions. [00:06:00] Think about it. You’re sitting in a deposition and you’re listening, right? You’re not taking the deposition. You, maybe you’re listening to somebody else or it’s your client. If you listen to the pattern, if someone is giving a very thoughtful answer and there’s a pause, right?
And it breaks up that train of thought and trying to get it back, sometimes it’s difficult. It’s definitely used on the offensive, right, to purposely interrupt somebody and kick that thought out of their brain or shut them down. But we shouldn’t be doing that when we’re sitting down to prepare somebody because we want to make sure we know what’s in there.
And But we can also do this subtly and unconsciously with our body language or even with sounds. And specifically my example is, think about having listened to a podcast, an interview, and as the host asks the question, [00:07:00] then they sit to listen. Some hosts just listen. But because it’s audio, I know I’ve listened to episodes where the host is uh huh, uh huh, um, uh huh, uh huh.
And it’s very, you can hear it because again, it’s podcast is mostly audio. You can’t see the person nodding their head. And it can. Get to a point where if you are at the right tone that diverts our attention and stops us talking and Specifically, I know that because that’s what I experience when people are having conversation with me I’ve had a business coach who that’s the way She was active listening.
She’d go uh huh and I stopped because I think she’s gonna say something so Most people do the same thing, especially in that client lawyer relationship. And again, it stops the train of thought. Now they’re going back to giving all their attention to you versus what they’re saying. And occasionally we can do this with body language as [00:08:00] well.
When people are very nervous, or they’re going to talk about something very sensitive, or they don’t really want to be vulnerable, they’ll use any excuse. To stop talking and that includes your body language. Maybe you shift in the chair, you pick up your pen, or you uhhuh or you hold up your hand or something.
That could be super subtle. You’re not trying to get their attention, but it does, generally interrupting is just gonna just kinda interrupt that flow of thought and. Stop the conversation, right? We want this back and forth. You want the flow. So keep that in mind when thinking about work stuff, but also business stuff in a work life situation, especially with our clients, they’re not going to likely say, stop interrupting me.
So Another way that we can shut folks down, and again, most of these things we’re doing because we want to help, right? We’re not doing these things because we want to make people stop talking. I think we know how to make people stop talking. We interrupt them. [00:09:00] But we do this kind of subconsciously, and that would be if someone is struggling with answering a question.
Maybe it’s about you’re asking for examples or getting someone to think back in time a year, two years, what was going on. And we And you use comparisons with other clients. And oh, well I had a client who, they also went through this same experience and this is what happened to them. Is that what’s happening to you?
Again, we’re just trying to help people get the flow of thoughts going. And most of the time though, clients just put that in a box now. Oh that is, that’s the right answer. That’s what you’re looking for. But I don’t have that. So it just must not be there. It shuts them down because you’re basically pigeonholing what it is.
You’ve asked the question and it’s very specific versus being very broad just to see what the experience is or if it’s the same. We have all kinds of examples in our heads [00:10:00] of our past clients, but that doesn’t mean we need to start asking and comparing because that’s what the client does in their head.
They start comparing, well that wasn’t my experience, but should have been my experience. Or is that better than what my experience was? Like is there something that I didn’t do then? So it’s all this comparison, which is just not good for our brains and our personalities. We kind of go up on a tangent and again, we can also shut down if we just don’t think that’s the right answer.
And so many times when we’re dealing with clients, that’s what they think we want, the quote unquote right answer, not necessarily what the true experience was. And that’s not even for people who are trying to swindle or lie or half truths. People really just want to please and they know that we are the keeper of the keys, the knowledge.
We know in our experience, they know what is the quote unquote right answer. That last thing that we can do to shut down or to turn clients off would be to talk about ourselves with [00:11:00] examples. Right now, I’m not talking about you come in, you have the icebreaker, you’re having good bonding here, you’re asking about life and how it’s going, you’re sharing, that’s different.
What I’m talking about is when you are using yourself or your experience as an example to the client and it just, again, puts things back into a box. But also most of our clients don’t have the same experience as us. And when we get into giving examples with factual details. And boy, how do we love our details, right?
Love our details. When really what we’re trying to convey is empathy or an emotional feeling. And so if you want to share, which I generally don’t share at all, if we’re getting into the prep session and we’re working through the prep session, I don’t use myself as example. But if you’re going to share at all, just aim for the feeling, right?
Don’t leave out the details. [00:12:00] Right. Don’t need to get into any kind of nitty gritty details, factual details, because that’s where you’re really trying to connect with them is on an emotional level and being empathetic with them for them. And again, that’s what drives so many of us to do what we do. And I think that it’s amazing and wonderful, but sometimes we can get lost in the details.
And then it becomes so much more about what has happening to us or happened to us, right? Those details, the story. And then we’re moving off what we need the client to do. And also sometimes our experiences are so far different that then it’s hard then for the client to share or to open up. And again, they also, from an emotional standpoint, if they don’t want to talk about it, they’re going to get you to keep talking about yourself.
Because that’s what we do. We don’t want to talk about something, let’s talk about you. Shove it off on, on, on something else or someone else so they don’t talk about themselves. [00:13:00] Okay. So very short episode here, but just three kind of small things that little things that we can have a smaller awareness about by not turning our clients off.
Sometimes it’s just the smallest little things that we do, but these are pretty big examples. So I didn’t want to nitpick on the small things. Let’s look at our big things. Interrupting, That’s a huge one. Client comparison makes it very difficult for people. And then talking and using yourself as example.
And again, getting into that story that the factual details versus staying at that emotional level. So, I hope this was helpful. I hope that as you go into your next prep session, whether it’s a smaller case event or a deposition, that you kind of keep those things in mind. And how do we avoid doing those things?
Let’s ask broad, open ended questions. Let people finish their thought before you jump in. And if you would like to be empathetic, keep it at that emotional feeling level and try to avoid story. So I hope this was helpful and until [00:14:00] next time. Thank you.